Though Akl’s own personal journey was and remains idiosyncratic - it was the poet who suggested to General Michael Aoun to begin his speeches with “O Great People of Lebanon” rather than, say, “Ladies and Gentlemen” - his desire to create a new form equal to the task of representing contemporary speech was something he shared with many of his political enemies. For Akl, Lebanon was the center of the universe, the seat of Canaan its people, the ancestors of the Jews, had invented the written word, the color purple, and Europe.
His cosmology had a similarly epic scope. He might have found more allies if he were not given to proclamations like “I would cut off my right hand just to not be an Arab.”Īkl signed his contributions to Lebnaan “Melqart, king of the city,” after the legendary demigod and protector of the Phoenician city of Tyre.
He didn’t advocate a literal return to the language of the Phoenicians, but rather to the spirit of their contribution to all languages, the phonetic alphabet. But for Akl the Arabic language was the Lebenssprache of its speakers in their own place and time. Especially critical were calligraphers, who insisted that the language was inseparable from the script itself. The paper’s founder and editor, Said Akl, deplored classical Arabic and printed his own language in its place: “Lebanese,” he called it, a Latinate version of colloquial Arabic, rooted in ancient Phoenician script.Īkl’s approach to the spoken Arabic was controversial from the start. More recently, there was Lebnaan, reminding the Lebanese of their beginnings.
In the beginning, there were Phoenicians. “The Calligraphers answer back at Said Akl” Al-Alam Al-Arabi, March 31, 1968
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